Research indicates we’ll need to develop a secure, biometrically verified digital twin in order for the metaverse to work.
The metaverse we were promised through big tech’s hype and centuries of science fiction has yet to materialize. The masses haven’t embraced it, most people still aren’t conducting business meetings there, and there’s nothing out there even remotely close to the “Ready Player One” experience. A team of scientists in Italy, however, recently published research that could help us get there.
Their paper, titled “Metaverse & Human Digital Twin: Digital Identity, Biometrics, and Privacy in the Future Virtual Worlds,” describes how interoperability and data ownership will become key foundations for a digital analog of the real world.
Everything people do on the internet creates a trail of data that, when associated with their identity, paints a surprisingly clear picture of who they are as a person. In the years since the advent of the internet, this data has been used for everything from targeting advertisements to conducting emotional manipulation experiments.
